My friend's wedding cost me £5,000 - I was shamed for trying to skip parts of it
There comes a time in everyone’s life when the excitement sparked by a friend’s “WE’RE ENGAGED!!!” message is swiftly followed by immense dread. This time tends to be in your thirties, when it appears everyone decides that now is the time to commit, and to do so in the most expensive way possible.
The first wedding you attend is fine. You shrug off the cost of that round of baby Guinnesses and think nothing of having dropped near-£200 on an outfit for the occasion. Sure, the hotel was expensive, as was the train ticket up to the middle of nowhere, but hey, it’s a special occasion, right? You’ll shoulder the expense for your pals.
By the time the fourth wedding in the space of 12 months rolls around, you are a simmering cesspit of indignant rage and resentment. How dare your mate get married in the south of Italy, with multiple days of festivities (pre-wedding party! Post-wedding curing session!) necessitating almost a week’s worth of hotel fees? Why on earth would the bride ban the colour green, knowing that the one dress that hasn’t already had its outing is lovely shade of sage? And wait, they’re expecting contributions to their honeymoon, too? And the hen is a £200 spa day? And it’s not even a free bar?
According to the Money and Pensions Service, UK adults spend an average of £700 on each wedding event they attend, totting up to more than £2,000 each year. And that’s just to attend as a guest. When hen parties and stag dos come into play, the costs rocket further.
So it makes sense that 31 per cent of Brits RSVP “no” to weddings for financial reasons – according to a recent poll of 2,000 adults by Tesco Bank – rising to 48 per cent for Gen Z and 43 per cent for millennials.
It’s not rare for friendships to flounder as a result. People share their stories of wedding guest expenses they’ve been expected to front up, along with how this impacted their friendships with the happy couple.
“I let a friendship die because they wanted to do a Disney World wedding. As in, to get married at the resort in Florida, with everyone paying full cost to fly over there, stay at the hotel, do multiple days on the rides. It would’ve cost more than £3,000 each. My wife (girlfriend at the time) and I said we couldn’t swing it and got uninvited. Then Covid happened so the Disney wedding didn’t happen anyway, but they never spoke to us again. It was sad because we’d been friends for a long time.”
“A couple my partner and I know arranged their wedding in a small town in Wales on Boxing Day. There’s only one (very expensive) hotel there and the couple and all their friends live in London, so no one can drive or has a car, meaning lengthy train journeys were the only option. The couple were expecting guests to ruin their own Christmas by going to Wales and spending hundreds on a hotel. I dropped out because I didn’t like them enough to spend that sort of cash, but I heard how miserable it was from friends who did attend and spent north of £1,000. I found out that the couple only gave guests one drink, after that they had to pay. To this day, the couple brag about how they had a ‘lovely cheap wedding’. Cheap for them, maybe!”
“I was really surprised – and flattered – when a friend from university asked me to be her bridesmaid. It turned out very badly for both my finances and the friendship. First, there was the hen do organised by the bride’s sister, which was in a villa abroad and cost £400 each. Then she had two wedding ceremonies, and for the first one all us bridesmaids had to pay around £200 for dresses to be made. When I picked mine up it didn’t fit – I couldn’t do it up. When I raised this with the bride she said that I would need to pay for the alterations. I pushed back and in the end she covered the cost, but she was furious. It was incredibly awkward.
“On my way into the first ceremony, I was told I needed to get cash out to throw at the bride during the first dance as it was a cultural tradition. It needed to be US dollars, at least £100 worth, and a minimum of $5 per note. I refused and explained I just didn’t have any more money. Thankfully, someone handed me some of their cash.
“Finally, there was the traditional white wedding ceremony, where the couple asked for another gift, and I had to pay for the travel up and back. I never brought it up but she definitely knew that money was the issue. She hasn’t spoken to me since.” In total, she spent around £5,200 on the wedding.
“A good friend of mine got married to a super wealthy guy and honestly I think she forgot that normal people have to think about money. They decided to get married in Spain because their families lived in different countries and they felt like the fairest option was to make everyone travel, but chose a villa miles away from the airport, so my boyfriend and I had to pay for a £140 taxi on top of the flights. The dress code was ‘black tie’, so I had to buy a floor-length gown and heels and my boyfriend had to get a new suit. All the wedding guests went out for a dinner the night before the wedding and we had the cheapest thing on the menu and no booze, but then there was load of pressure to split the bill evenly and cover the cost of the couple’s meal and drinks. I paid because I didn’t want to be difficult but the whole long weekend I was stressed about how much I was spending. We spent at least £1,500.”
“When my best friend got married it was chaos. She lost half her bridesmaids during the planning process and people dropped out of the hen do left, right and centre. As the maid of honour, I ended up sucking up most of the costs – I was £600 out of pocket over the original £200 I had budgeted. I couldn’t ask people to pay more because the prices had all been agreed and I didn’t want to draw attention to the issues.
“Then the wedding itself was in France on a bank holiday weekend. Return flights set me and my partner back £480 each. We had to do a minimum of four nights as it was a five-day event, so our accommodation cost us well over £1,000. Then there was the hire care, the drinks, the meals… I felt like I couldn’t say anything because one of the bridesmaids had raised her concerns and got demoted to just a guest, then she didn’t end up coming.
“I put up with the costs – £3,500 in total – because the bride is my best friend and it was an amazing experience – as long as I ignored the panic in my head about how I would replace the savings. Less than two years later, the couple split up.”
“My childhood friend married someone whose family was based abroad and they decided to have the wedding there, so it was convenient for his family but really difficult for everyone else. The flights ended up costing more than £4,000 – my boyfriend and I tried to cost save with a budget airline, then we had some real struggles with connecting flights and had to pay loads for new, last-minute tickets. Further transport I paid £300 for, the accommodation was £500, the hair and make-up I had to get as I was a bridesmaid was £150. The hen do was £230 per person. It cost me more than £5,200 in total.
“The wedding events lasted a few days, and any time my partner and I tried to skip out on something to save money there was such harsh judgment that we felt guilted into spending more. Since then, there hasn’t been any effort from either me or her to see each other, so I’m accepting that the friendship is likely just over.”